Life is a rush of contingencies. The wonderful, terrible sublime of “before” and “after,” a strange and delicate dance of relativity. As we commit experience to memory, details become blurred, lost, remixed—fact folded with sensation, sequencing lost to the abyss of recollection. Over time, we embellish, or crystallize moments, often losing more than we retain. Like episodic TV viewing, we construct a mosaic by assembling clues extracted from the media flow—from our life experiences—allowing us to “know” people, places, and events by collating often disparate pieces of data, much of it reframed (often misunderstood).

Using cell phone photography in a real-time system of manipulation, I captured digital “monotypes” from the TV screen, generating an archive of 23,000+ experimental images. These image-cells were mined from a personally poignant television series--Miami Vice, which I watched in its original context, during a time of personal loss and disruption. Using an obsessive, ritual system of watching and extracting, combined with manual and digital glitch, I suggest the imperfection of memory and our incomplete understanding of situations--colored by a disturbing voyeurism. These suspended moments are seemingly extracted from the “before” and “after” of an unclear, yet disturbing, system of events that vacillate between the almost-gained and almost-lost. ​The characters, like memory, are composed of fragments, sampled and informed by our own recollection of other images in the installation. The viewer might begin to understand, but true clarity is denied. This endless catastrophe of “instants” combines passive works on paper, active video and intimate View-Master spaces—and my eroded heroes are denied resolution, forever stuck in transition. Undermined, human, uncertain, temporary.​(2016)

Project Statement

Life is a rush of contingencies. The wonderful, terrible sublime of “before” and “after,” a strange and delicate dance of relativity. As we commit experience to memory, details become blurred, lost, remixed—fact folded with sensation, sequencing lost to the abyss of recollection. Over time, we may even embellish, or crystallize moments, often losing more than we retain.

Memory formation relates to the way we engage television—we grab bits and pieces of information about characters and situations, often by viewing episodes out of order. We understand events by assembling a sensitive web of memories, culled, even appropriated, from different seasons. Like episodic TV viewing, we construct a mosaic by assembling clues extracted from the media flow—from our life experiences—allowing us to “know” people, places, and events by collating often disparate pieces of data, much of it reframed (often misunderstood).

Using cell phone photography in a real-time system of manipulation, I spent 8 months capturing digital “monotypes” from the TV screen, generating an archive of 23,000+ experimental images. These image-cells were mined from a personally poignant television series--Miami Vice, which I watched in its original context, during a time of personal loss and disruption. Using an obsessive, ritual system of watching and extracting, combined with manual and digital glitch, I suggest the imperfection of memory and our incomplete understanding of situations. These suspended moments are seemingly extracted from the “before” and “after” of an unclear, yet disturbing, system of events that vacillate between the almost-gained and almost-lost. An eerie voyeurism casts additional fragility.

The characters, like memory, are composed of fragmented, episodic information, sampled and informed by our own recollection of other images in the installation. The viewer might begin to understand, but true clarity is denied. There is a tense passage of moment into moment, an endless catastrophe of “instants” presented as passive works on paper, active video and intimate View-Master spaces. My eroded heroes are denied resolution, forever stuck in transition, their lives suspended as frozen, oddly linked moments—undermined, human, uncertain, temporary.

​(2016)

About the Work

Whitespace-Bluespace – Televisual Memory and the Implied Catastrophe is a multimedia installation that combines works on paper, video, and View-Master toys to address the unreliability of memory and perception. By investigating the wonderful, terrible sublime of “before” and “after,” Adams’ television-infused spaces offer a delicate dance of relativity.

Using cell phone photography in a real-time system of manipulation, Adams spent 8 months capturing digital “monotypes” from the TV screen, generating an archive of nearly 24,000 experimental images. Mined from Miami Vice, which she originally watched during a time of personal loss, Adams used an obsessive system of viewing and extracting. Her glitches suggest the imperfection of memory and our incomplete understanding of sequence and situation. The resulting environments are soft, fluid and abstract, inhabited by a cast of “heroes” who are undermined, human, uncertain and temporary.

In fact, characters in Whitespace-Bluespace… are composed of fragments, like memory itself. Adams’ work suggests that our memories, like episodic TV viewing, are an abstract palette. We construct a mosaic of understanding by assembling clues extracted from media—from our life experiences—allowing us to “know” people, places, and events by collating data, much of it reframed (often misunderstood). Her work uses passive and active media to investigate the tension between specificity and obscurity, emphasizing the distance between what is known and unknown.

​(2016)

More information on how the work was created:

Each night for 8 months, for an hour each night, I did experimental photographic "monotypes" right from the television screen, making good use of the show's one-hour, rebroadcast time slot and its watery, softened, non-HD form. I set rigid parameters for my manipulation times and methods. I could have easily watched it all in a week or two, binge-style, and done my work in this manner, but there was something about slowing down, about restricting the raw manipulations to an hour each day, that became integral to the project. The time restraints prevented me from being out, from doing other things, tying me to the TV screen each night--sometimes against my will. This body of work had a physical and literal impact on my life. Slowing down put me in a different headspace. Different events, moods, daily affects--these all impacted the way I engaged the televisual language on a given evening.​Limiting myself to an hour of generating imagery created both tension and frustration--some nights I was energized, wanting more and more! Other nights, my life-circumstances bogged me and the project was dogged, nagging, relentless. That's how I knew I was entering fruitful territory. When I felt like doing more, I curated and glitched selected moments, rather than finding a way to gather additional raw imagery.The process was all-consuming. Gathering became an intense daily ritual that lengthened the scope of the project, requiring focused introspection and systematic gathering. After gathering, I also put some of the stills through additional glitch manipulation, to purposefully lose, obscure and erode key information that might have provided clarity and resolution. I watched the series through twice, researching and taking notes, then on the third time through, one hour each day, I extracted particular kinds of imagery--one season at a time, one episode at a time, through completion.

The result is a 23,000 + image archive, composed of the original, real-time manual glitch / experimental photographic pieces and digital glitch images. This in itself has a stark relevancy I'm still unpacking. It makes prolific use of the "before" and "after" I describe in my blog post - Before, After - Part 1, and the characters are trapped in a terrible cycle, suspended within an indeterminate space of the impending and the retreating. Some of the experimental photographs, rather like monotypes in their single-shot pull from the screen, are left raw. These don't undergo more manipulation after the fact, and are prescient, alive. Others receive glitch treatment. Once gathered, processing the archive took another month of nearly 8 hours a day! Thinking like a printmaker, I then turned each of the image-cells into passive, active, direct and indirect outputs, like stills on paper or layers within video work.

Why Miami Vice?

My engagement with the televisual language of the program is tied to a distinct sequence of “before” and “after” life-moments of personal impact. As I mentioned in my essay, Before, After Part 1, I watched Miami Vice on our little TV (when we had electricity), recorded at a friend’s house on a watery VHS tape because we couldn’t afford a VHF antenna, watched and re-watched because it was a precious capture. The process of borrowing and remixing media via tape, and savoring each chance I got to watch it, was tied into my parents’ impending divorce, and the downward spiral of homelessness, distancing and confusion that resulted.

The characters seemed so strong at the time, I longed to be both of the male heroes in alternation.

I reacquainted myself with the series quite by accident, just after my thesis work, which also dealt with the impact of televisual media on concepts of self and place. Stumbling across it on Cozi TV also coincided with tumult in other parts of my life, and at first it was a welcome, aesthetically compelling refuge.

After only an episode, I found it stirred a lot of surprising sensations within me–from gushing philosophy to raw emotion, adding fuel to my media-mind. I found a fascinating, compelling thread running through each episode–the male heroes often faced loss, destruction of the self, a terrible sense of distancing–the deaths of loved ones, failure to complete missions, subjugation by terrible enemies, denial of closure–in episodic tenacity. They were rarely successful in an iconic fashion, instead suffering loss and resistance at every turn. Resolutions were complicated, problematic, and even when things tipped in their favor, it rarely resolved the way they expected (or hoped). There were no ridiculously triumphant heroes here.I had rediscovered heroes already plagued by a strange tension between the appearance of success and the corrosion of endless defeat. A progression that unsettles and warps the main characters, with Sonny in particular emergent as a jaded, unwilling participant in his own publicized tragedy. I watched the series several times through, savoring each moment as I had in my youth, realizing I was simultaneously tipping over into a new body of work, with new territory. It’s funny how that happens.

It’s so easy for many artists (and people in general) to deride “old” TV, as if by the very nature of its context, it epitomizes failure and deserves ridicule because it is from the time “before.” You, dear readers, know me by now. I never deride. Each media-moment is vital, worth refreshing and revisiting, or revitalizing in the present moment. I never judge the programs that compel me for being simply themselves. How could I?